Category: Korea-General Topics

Here is another preventable deadly safety related accident in South Korea:

Five people, including three children, died and two others were injured in a tent fire at a camping site in Incheon, a port city west of Seoul, early Sunday, police and fire officials said.

The fire broke out around 1:20 a.m. inside a 16 square-meter tent set up at a camping ground close to a beach on Ganghwa Island of Incheon, according to the officials. Those killed included a 37-year-old father, identified only by his last name Lee, and two of his sons, aged 11 and six, they said. Lee’s middle school friend, surnamed Cheon, and his seven-year-old son were also killed inside the same tent.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

I’m not sure what this teacher’s group is complaining about?  Do they want bribery and corruption in the teaching profession?:

The country’s largest right-leaning education organization on Thursday denounced an order issued this week by the Seoul education authority that strictly prohibits teachers from accepting bribes from parents, otherwise known here as chonji.

On Sunday, the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education issued a press release announcing that bribery would not be tolerated in any form and that any person who reported a teacher accepting gifts or cash would be given a reward ten times the amount of the kickback, up to 100 billion won ($89.4 million).

The Korea Federation of Teachers’ Associations (KFTA) subsequently requested that Seoul Superintendent Cho Hee-yeon apologize for publicly regarding all educators as “potential perpetrators,” arguing that teachers already attempt to foster a morally sound atmosphere.

“Given that teachers are required to have a relatively higher level of morality, we’ve been making efforts to create a more transparent culture by establishing an ethics charter in 2005,” KFTA Chairman Ahn Yang-ok said at a rally Thursday morning in front of the capital city’s education office. “The overall majority of teachers are not accepting chonji at all.”

“But the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education has issued provocative press releases saying they would discipline even those who accept 10,000 won and have disgraced all teachers,” he continued. “Cho must apologize and come up with countermeasures.”

The Seoul’s education office explained that when it announced the new regulation, it merely intended to reassure parents so that they wouldn’t agonize over bringing in a gift for their child’s teachers.

The new regulation also demands that schools not disclose the home addresses of its teachers and send text messages to parents explaining that bribery will not be allowed. Educators are only allowed to accept gifts that do not exceed 30,000 won and only at public events like Teachers’ Day or graduation ceremonies.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

This looks like a good idea since the kindergartens are focusing on teaching mixed race children the Korean language and culture:

The Ministry of Education said Tuesday that it will run 30 kindergartens nationwide specifically for children from multiracial families.

The ministry will select six kindergartens each from Gyeonggi, South Chungcheong, South Jeolla, South Gyeongsang Provinces and Seoul – which will receive 7 million won ($6,200) this year for making programs dedicated to multiracial children.

The selected kindergartens won’t be required to teach multiracial children only, but they have to develop and run additional programs that can help them develop their Korean language skills and social identity.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out:

A kiss between two schoolgirls that hit airwaves in the South Korean drama “Sunam Girls High School Detectives” is under investigation by the Korea Communications Standards Commission, Yonhap reported.

The commission opened a sub-committee Wednesday to discuss the JTBC series, which follows five high school students who solve mysteries around their school.

The drama showed two female students sharing an unprecedented onscreen kiss on its February 25 broadcast, and saw the students hugging on March 4.

The subcommittee said it received a civil complaint stating that the “explicit kiss scene between two female homosexuals” was unhealthy for young viewers for a program rated 15 years or older.  [Korea Times]

This probably does not come as much of a surprise to most Korea watchers that Korean students are very stressed out in regards to their studies:

Korean kids are the most stressed about their studies in the world, a study reveals.

A whopping 50.3 percent of Korean kids are stressed about their studies, the highest proportion among 30 countries surveyed, according to an analysis by Kim Mi-sook of the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs.

Relatively high stress was also recorded in Spain (49.4 percent), Slovenia (48.9 percent), and Portugal (47.2 percent). The least stressed kids were in the Netherlands (16.8 percent), Hungary (18.4 percent), Slovakia (19.1 percent), Austria (20 percent), and France (20.8 percent).

Only 18.5 percent of kids in Korea said they are “very happy” at school. Korea comes fifth from the bottom after Estonia (9.2 percent), Italy (14.8 percent), Finland (15.3 percent), and Czech Republic (17.3 percent).  [Chosun Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

It is too bad these idiots won’t face punishment in South Korea for this.  The Korean government says they are not going to request extradition because property crimes don’t warrant it.  Regardless what a disgrace:

On Feb. 2, four Australians in baseball caps and hoodies appeared around Wangsimni Station, eastern Seoul, at three in the morning. They carefully scoped out the area and then stopped in front of a ventilation window behind a bus stop. They cut the bars of the window and swung down to a temporary garage where a car for the Line No. 5 subway was idle.

Using spraypaint, they covered the car with graffiti art and then moved on.

Two days later, they penetrated Anam Station, northeastern Seoul, and left graffiti that read “FEDUP” in giant letters on a subway train. The following day, the four men did the same thing at the Sinnonhyeon Station on Feb. 5, leaving the declaration “ERROR” on a Line No. 9 train.

It was only after they flew back to their home country on Feb. 7 that the police identified the four Australians with security camera footage. They matched their faces on security footage from the airport and then checked immigration records.

The four men were found to have spent 10 days in Korea – dedicating at least three of those nights to spraypainting Seoul subway cars.

“We don’t understand how foreigners who never traveled to Korea before knew so expertly the subway stations’ structures,” said Shim Mun-sik, chief of a crime investigation department of the Seongdong Police Precinct.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

With stories like this I can understand special legislation to deal with these situations on a case by case basis, but it does not require mass amnesty for illegal immigrants sweeping across the border to address this:

The pending deportation of Adam Thomas Crapser, an undocumented Korean American adoptee and survivor of severe child abuse, has sparked a dialogue on a major loophole in immigration law, according to NBC News.

When Adam first arrived in the U.S. in 1979 as a Korean adoptee, his childhood quickly turned into a nightmare. He and his biological sister were adopted by the Wright family in Michigan, where he suffered physical, emotional and sexual abuse. In 1986, the Wrights relinquished their parental rights to Child Services without completing Adam’s naturalization paperwork. As wards of the state, Adam and his sister became separated from each other. After living in a group home for a year, Adam was formally adopted by Thomas and Dolly-Jean Crapser in Oregon.

The Crapsers, along with their biological sons, subjected Adam and seven other foster children to years of heinous abuse and torture. In an interview with Gazillion Strong, Adam revealed that he would get choked, beaten or burnt on a daily basis during the five years he lived with his abusive adoptive family. In 1991, the Crapsers were arrested and convicted of multiple counts of child abuse, child sexual abuse and child rape.

Adam, now a husband and father of three children, faces possible deportation because both sets of adoptive parents failed to complete his naturalization process and refused to provide him with his adoption papers, according to the blog Reappropriate. As an undocumented American, Adam has struggled to attend school or find work for most of his adult life. If deported, he will be sent to a country where he does not even speak the language.  [KoreAm Journal]

You can read more at the link, but hopefully this gets worked out for Adam Crapser, especially since the US government is to blame for his situation considering they allowed him to be adopted without naturalization paperwork and then not once, but twice put him in abusive homes.

It is kind of sad that an app needs to be developed because this problem has gotten so bad in South Korea:

This makes me wonder if this is the wave of the future where hackers will extort companies for money in return for not releasing sensitive information to rivals or other countries?:

A hacker who had posted inside information on South Korea’s nuclear power plants made a fresh threat Thursday, demanding money in exchange for not handing over sensitive information to third countries.

Using an account under the name of the president of an anti-nuclear group in Hawaii, the hacker posted additional files on Twitter, which reportedly included documents concerning the country’s indigenous advanced power reactor 1400.

“Need money. Only need to meet some demands… Many countries from Northern Europe, Southeast Asia and South America are saying they will buy nuclear reactor information. Fear selling the entire information will undermine President Park (Geun-hye)’s efforts to export nuclear reactors,” the posting said.

The hacker did not say how much money he wanted but warned that South Korea will end up losing much more if it tries to save a few hundreds of millions of dollars.

Officials from the Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. (KHNP) said the documents released Thursday did not include any sensitive information and that they may have been obtained before the company boosted its security measures early last year that included completely cutting off its internal servers used to operate nuclear reactors from all outside access.

They earlier said they were not able to determine the nature or sensitivity of the released documents as safety protocol was blocking the downloading or opening of the files.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

I can understand the ROK government’s viewpoint on this, but if the activists do not get media attention for their activities then they will have a hard time receiving support to sustain their operations:

South Korea expressed concern Tuesday over civic groups’ plans to publicly send leaflets to North Korea, indicating that it will try to block them.

Days ago, a group of civic groups announced their plan to send anti-Pyongyang leaflets to North Korea on March 26, the fifth anniversary of the North’s torpedoing of a South Korean Navy ship in March 2010.

Civic groups involved in the leaflet campaign have often pre-announced their campaigns so their activities could draw media and social attention. Such campaigns intended to spread dissenting messages, however, often lead to wild indignation and military reaction from Pyongyang.

“Believing that spreading leaflets publicly is not right, the government has been urging prudent and wise decisions (from civic groups),” a unification ministry official told reporters on condition of anonymity. “I think there needs to be expression of such a government stance through whatever means, including person-to-person contact.”

Still, scattering leaflets basically falls in the sphere of a constitutionally given right to free expression, which the government cannot regulate with force, the official said.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.